This book draws on the lived experience of sound’s capacity to move and shake us in direct, subtle and profound ways through speech, location sound, and music in documentary film. The associative, connotative and sheer emotive power of sound has the capacity to move and shake us in a myriad of direct, subtle and often profound ways. The implications of this for its role as speech, location sound, and music in documentary film are far-reaching. The writers in this book draw on the lived experience of sound’s resounding capacity as primary motivation for exploring these implications, united by the overarching theme of how listening is connected with acts of making sense both on its own terms and in conjunction with viewing. The resulting thirteen essays of Soundings: Documentary Film and the Listening Experience cover films made from WWII to the present day in locations across Europe and the Americas, and in styles ranging from political propaganda, industrial promotion and educative exposition, to more aesthetically-driven films taking their bearings from avant-garde art. The authors draw on their experience in scholarly research, practice-as-research, and in the aesthetic and technical practice of documentary filmmaking. This mix of perspectives aims to widen and deepen the outlook of the recent and growing academic interest in the topic of documentary film sound.

Table of Contents:

Introduction; Stories from a stay at the Arena Hotel; Weave Me a Rainbow; ˈThe march, the march of colour and patternˈ: Music and cinematography at the service of the creative promotion of the 1960s Scottish woollen industry; Sonicules: Designing drugs with sound: approaches to 69 sound design for flm, audiovisual performance and interactive sonifcation; Auralising Action Space: channelling a sense of play in 85 documentary sound design; ˈThe flm looks like how Ornette soundsˈ: Shirley Clarkeˈs music documentary Ornette: Made in America Rosa Nogués; Progress Music; Creative use of voice in non-fction narrative flm: an examination of the work of Peter Mettler; Documentary flm as a backdrop for active thinking; Centrepiece: The unwanted sound of everything we think we want; The ˈAppassionataˈ Sonata in A Diary for Timothy; A ˈSymphony of Britain at Warˈ or the ˈRhythm of Workaday Britainˈ?: When the Pie Was Opened (1941) and the musicalisation of warfare; Building a sonic image of a nation: Finnish documentary and propaganda flms in the early decades of sound flm; Raúl Ruizˈs Now Weˈre Gonna Call You Brother and the 255 problem of the peopleˈs sonic representation; Afterword.

About The Author:

Geoffrey Cox is a Senior lecturer in Music and a filmmaker and composer of both acoustic and electronic music with a focus on its application to documentary film sound. This has resulted in a number of solo and collaborative film projects: Cider Makers (Marley and Cox, 2007), No Escape (Cox, 2009), A Film About Nice (Marley and Cox, 2010) and Tree People (Cox, 2014). He has recently finished working with Marley on Mill Study (2017), a short film about a working textile mill in Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire, which receives its overseas premiere at Ethnograflm, Paris in April 2018. He has published articles in The Soundtrack, The New Soundtrack and Contemporary Music Review on the contextual underpinning of his work. His most recent Organised Sound article (2017) links the pioneering approach to sound of pre-WWII British documentary filmmakers, with Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète.

John Corner is Visiting Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds and Professor Emeritus of the University of Liverpool. He has published widely since the 1970s in international journals and in books with aspects of documentary history and form a regular theme alongside theories of media power and the forms of political mediation. Edited collections relevant to this book include Documentary and the Mass Media (1986) and the co-edited New Challenges for Documentary (second edition, 2005). His monographs include The Art of Record (1996) and more recently Theorising Media (2011) and the co-authored Political Culture and Media Genre (2012).